Nanowrimo-ing Monkey #5 – It’s all over but the cryin’

Hidey-Ho Scribblers! J Monkeys here. Today is December 1st and Nanowrimo 2012 is officially over. This year, I’ve really challenged myself. While the standard goal is 50,000 words in 30 days, I’ve set myself a goal of 60,000 words in 30 days. That’s 2,000 words a day, every day, including Thanksgiving!

Did I do it? Well, I hit 50,060 on November 29th and called it a month. I’m excited that I made it this far. I’m a Nanowrimo 2012 Winner! Yippeeeee. I get such a sense of satisfaction out of that. So even though I didn’t make it to the 60K mark, I’m thrilled with the work that I did accomplish.

What worked? What helped me reach that goal? I found that by week two, I was terribly behind in my word count for two reasons.

1) Reality kept intruding on my work. The kids were off from school for a few days, we had things happening in the household that required me to paint and create a new bedroom for one of my kiddies, things like that.

2) My outline wasn’t juicy enough. I got stuck after about 12,000 words and I didn’t know what came next. When I realized that I wasn’t writing 2000 words in 3-4 hours, but rather 700 words in that same amount of time, I knew that the muse was absent. I decided to start writing out of order. I knew lots of scenes that need to happen in the book, so I just started writing scenes. Whatever scene appealed to me at that moment.

What hindered me? The more I wrote out of order, without taking the time to go back and fill in the blanks and put the book into order, I had trouble seeing the thread of the story. That’s one reason why I stopped at 50K. I need to go back and do a bit of editing work and I think that will actually make the writing process go more smoothly. And they say, December is the month for the inner editor…

Today’s secret: I’m a Winner! 🙂

Today’s question: How have you done on your personal challenges lately?